‘We The People’ in Search of Our ‘Last Best Hope’

When someone is overextended and broke they don’t continue paying for expensive automobiles, they sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one. They don’t continue paying for country club dues, they drop out of the country club,”Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.).

The lights of reason have apparently gone out in Georgia — and elsewhere in teabagger country. The Kabuki Theater surrounding the manufactured “debt ceiling” debate has drawn us closer to total financial chaos — whether or not there is a resolution in these final few days. Today’s report that the nation’s gross national product in the second quarter grew at the rate of maturity of the freshman class in the House (barely), doesn’t look good for either the “job creators” or those of us who have never owned an expensive car or joined a country club.

In the wake of Speaker Boehner’s failure to convince his own clown college to watch reruns of Truth or Consequences, it has become clear that the inmates are running the asylum. Chances are great that whether or not the President ultimately risks the threat of immediate impeachment by invoking the 14th amendment to keep America from having an Icelandic volcanic eruption, America’s country clubs may soon have to become camping grounds for the new homeless majority.

What has become of the American dream? Are we still the W-O-R-L-D? The 1985 tune sent a message that this country could come together and get passionate when people are starving in the world. Even back then, the thought of masses of people literally starving across this country rarely crossed anyone’s mind. In a time of Arab Spring, America’s passion seems to be entering the advanced stages of dementia. Our followers are kept a Twitter tweet away, and our friends are pictures on a Facebook wall. We watch television sitcoms in high definition, and prefer our civic lessons predefined by radio pundits.

I was delivered to this country by parents who believed in the American dream. When Sputnik charged the American dream into outer space, my father’s education as a physicist was enough to overcome his links to his World War II Nazi Luftwaffe past. As a twelve-year-old immigrant child, I had the privilege on a cold, January 1961morning in Washington, DC, to watch a young Massachusetts Senator take the oath of office to become President of the United States. His message that morning still rings in my ear: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Today, this President, battered by an unparalleled economy and an incomparable climate of derision in Washington, seems to be slowly drifting from his words of hope and change as a candidate in 2008:

“we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

These are the times that try America’s soul. If we are to restore our image as “the last, best hope on earth,” it is time to restore our national passion to greatness. It may require an expensive student loan, or a rocket ship to an unknown surface, but we can’t afford to surrender the very first words in our national Constitution: “We the people in order to form a more perfect union…”